All posts tagged Urban Management

Hong Kong’s incandescent skyline of colorfully illuminated buildings may be the city’s most distinctive calling card. But researchers at the University of Hong Kong say they’re fueling an unwelcome phenomenon: so-called “light pollution.”

In a wide-ranging study of the city’s light pollution, scientists collected data at 18 monitoring stations for three years, and found that the worst readings—at the city’s much-touristed harborfront in Tsim Sha Tsui—clocked numbers some 1,200 times in excess of international standards. Even rural areas and the city’s wetlands experienced light pollution, says Dr. Jason Pun, who led the study. Read More »

China’s urban population soared to 607 million last year out of a population of 1.3 billion.

After decades of being pushed aside by the mad rush towards capitalist individualism, communal living is making a comeback in big Chinese cities. But this isn’t your grandfather’s work unit-style communism.

With property prices so high that many big-city residents can’t afford to get their own apartments, enterprising landlords have taken to slicing up single large apartments into several smaller units using makeshift walls. And not just one or two. A recent story in the Beijing tabloid Jinghua Times describes what it calls China’s “most outstanding group-rental house”: a 2,000-square foot apartment in the Huahui Xinyuan complex near the city’s Olympic Park that has been subdivided into 20 separate rooms, each available for sublet. The largest of the rooms measures 100 square feet, roughly the same size as your standard maximum security prison cell. The smallest is less than half that. And coffin-like though the compartments may be, the landlady says the place is full. Read More »

China’s urban management officials, known as chengguan, are much maligned for their sometimes bullying behavior in dealing with street vendors and protesters. Some have adopted softer tactics, as we recently reported here. Others are taking China’s time-honored route of petitioning to their superiors for help.

The Southern Metropolis Daily reports (in Chinese here) on a set of pictures that were posted online, showing dozens of uniformed chengguan officers, male and female, quietly protesting before the government offices of Jiyuan city in central China’s Henan province. One photo shows several chengguan stretching a white banner across the city government’s gate. It reads: “I want survival, and also my dignity!” Read More »

China’s chengguan, or urban management officers, have gained a measure of nationwide notoriety for their violent treatment of street vendors and protesters. Responsible for ensuring the cleanliness of city streets and the maintenance of public order, their sometimes brutal enforcement tactics have triggered public scrutiny and outrage.

Last month, the east China city of Nanjing saw a major standoff between college students and chengguan after some students were forcibly preventing from selling goods on the street. (University officials denied that students were involved in the dispute with the chengguan.) In another infamous incident of chengguan enforcement gone awry, in January 2008 a construction executive in central China was beaten to death by officers after he used his mobile phone to film a clash between chengguan and protesters over garbage dumping.

In April, a practical chengguan manual was posted on the Internet, providing instructions on how to beat people with “no blood on the face, no wounds on the body,” among other tactics, which further fueled the public antipathy towards urban management officers, who are not part of any police force (report in Chinese here).

Legal experts have long called for changes to the chengguan system. In some cases, aggrieved targets of chengguan attention have taken matters into their own hands, such as the recent incident in Shenzhen, where a vendor stabbed and seriously injured an officer who was clearing peddlers from doing business in front of a Wal-Mart store (report in Chinese here).

In the central Chinese city of Wuhan, chengguan are responding by taking a milder approach. Read More »

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